Between Warfare and Lawfare: the Issue of National Minorities in Ukraine’s EU Accession Process

During 2022-25, as part of the EU accession process and despite turbulences posed by warfare, Ukraine reviewed and adopted new legal framework on national minorities, including a specific financial programme, as well as strengthened institutional powers of a governmental body responsible for this policy area. Given that the Ukrainian government failed to adopt the new minorities law by early 2020 – the deadline established by law, the post-2022 changes could well be seen as a sign of positive impact of the EU accession process, opening a window of political opportunities for minority groups and a path to real alignment with the “United in Diversity” motto. Namely, specific attention towards Ukraine’s regulations on national minorities was part of the 7 requirements upon which the European Commission conditioned Ukraine’s candidacy status in 2022, with Hungary being the most vocal EU Member State on ensuring the minorities issue has been present on the EU-Ukraine agenda. That is in line with a well-established observation on EU’s conditionality as transformative power during the negotiation process. However, a more nuanced look points to limitations of the preliminary conclusion described above, as the EU does not have its own comprehensive obligatory minority framework for Ukraine to transpose and implement, and the only interest of Hungary was the Hungarian minority but not minority policy as such. With almost no terra firma, the EU has to rely on external mechanisms, such as the Council of Europe minorities framework, and mediate Hungarian demands. Operation at the space so sensitive to Member States, as identity politics, has contributed to further politicization of the issue with unexplored implications for minorities in Ukraine at domestic level as well as relevant EU policies and EU integration project at transnational level. This paper applies lawfare analytical lenses to reveal how discussions concerning national minorities have been strategically weaponized by Hungary, and why deconstruction of such techniques is pivotal to understanding tensions around the minority issue. While acknowledging limitations of the “lawfare” concept, this research shows benefits of its application to the proposed case compared to EU law implementation approaches, including through alternative explanations and policy proposals. Ukraine’s hard security has been conditioned upon a minorities issue for a long with the examples of Russian warfare, which the Russian Federation tried to justify, among others, with the illegal argument of “protection of the Russians”, as well as the Hungarian blockade of Ukraine-NATO pre-2022 dialogue followed by vetoes in the EU accession process after 2022, which is the focus of the proposed research. Bridging legal and political studies approaches under the lawfare umbrella, this paper claims that the reasons for linking the minorities issue with geopolitical alliances is to be found not in Ukraine’s domestic regulation or modern interpretations of the human security concept, but in foreign policy tensions with respective implications both for minorities in Ukraine and the EU integration project overall.